Powerhouse Animation is a full service creative agency that produces work for a variety of industries including TV, film, video games, advertising, and corporate explainer videos. Check out our 2013 demo reel!

Services

Powerhouse Animation offers a wide variety of creative services. From pre-production tasks like character design and concept design to storyboards and animatics to final turn-key production of traditional animation, motion comics, and commercial animation. Click to learn more from this menu of some of our services and view examples.

2D Animation

As a service animation studio, we have worked in almost every style of traditional animation from gritty anime to feature animation to web-based cartoon animation. Powerhouse has been trusted with some of the world’s most important brands: Looney Tunes, Mickey Mouse, Marvel Comics, and DC Comics characters (to name a few) have all been entrusted to Powerhouse Animation.

Do you have an idea you would like to bring to life? Contact us and we will walk you through the whole process and quickly get you a bid and schedule. We will explain everything from character design, concept design, storyboards, and animatics to final production of your unique traditional animation.

Explainer Videos

These days your business idea can be complex. Couple that with modern attention spans and it can be hard to explain your brilliant concept to the masses. Animated explainer videos, (sometimes called homepage videos and whiteboard videos) are a good way to explain your concept efficiently so that you get the most attention you can. Powerhouse takes all of the complex nuances of your new business or product idea and puts it into an explainer video for you website and social media. Powerhouse Animation can help you every step of the way in creating your explainer video. The videos we create can be used online in Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail campaigns and can then be used in your trade shows and office space. Art from our development can be used in your branding and print materials. Whether you make widgets or are in pharma, we can help. Call us and let us know what your big idea is.

Video Games

Powerhouse is well known the for our work in video game production. Powerhouse has created and concepted video game cinemas for games like DC Universe Online, Epic Mickey 1 & 2, Starhawk and many more. Powerhouse has also created animated video game assets on projects like Risk Factions, Kevin Smith’s Smarcade games for example. Check out some of our favorite examples by clicking on the videos below

Motion Comics

We bring people into your world: From the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier to the streets of Gotham city, Powerhouse pulls viewers into the vast world of comics through motion comics production for some of the biggest brands in entertainment. We treat motion comics differently than other groups that claim work in this space. Click on some of our examples to see some very unique takes on this modern artform.

Advertising

Animation by American Capitalists: Powerhouse has been producing award winning animation (link to Clio) for advertising campaigns since 2001. We love figuring out new innovative ways to use animation to help get the right tone and message for your campaign. Please click on and check out some of our favorites from the past 13 years.

Storyboards

It’s like a time travel: Doing storyboards and animatics with professional animators with the experience that Powerhouse Animation has, gives you a peek into your production before you turn a camera on, or begin the animation process. Powerhouse has done storyboarding for live-action, 3d animation production, as well as traditional animation. We can render in highly realistic digital painting, or work rough just to plan things out. Check out some samples from our projects below.

Motion Graphics

We can breath life into your message- even without characters. Information, whether graphically represented or based on typography, can be animated to help your audience retain, spread, and enjoy your message. Whether its for a website, explainer video, trade show, corporate presentation or viral marketing, sometimes motion graphics is the best approach. Click on some of these examples to see what we are talking about.

Concept Design

Powerhouse Animation works with game studios, filmmakers, ad agencies and creative developers in the early stages of production to help create a unique and cohesive visual style through concept design production for their project. Our artists are adept at creating concepts for characters and worlds that will give a game depth and help establish its aesthetic identity.

Music Videos

Animation and music go together, from A-ha’s “Take on Me,” to the animated band Gorilliaz- animated music videos can make a great song even more memorable. Powerhouse Animation created the first animated video that ran on CMT (Lonestar’s Mr. Mom– which had a long run as the top video on the country music station) and created the Funny or Die directed video for Wale’s Back to Ballin, check these and our other favorite examples below:

Mobile Games

The gaming landscape is changing, whether you are making a interactive piece for an ad campaign or have the next great game idea, Powerhouse Animation has the experience in creating design and animation for Interactive and Mobile games production. We have worked on games on all platforms: Flash, Arcade, IOS, Unity, Console, and Facebook. We have helped develop small custom games and worked on award winning interactive games. Check out some of our favorites below.

Character Design

Powerhouse artists create characters and mascots for a wide variety of our clients for various projects including advertising campaigns, product representation Television series, animated webisodes, interactive games, and educational content. Whether you have an idea and personality already in mind, or whether we’re starting from scratch, our team is great at delivering a diverse array of styles, and working closely with clients to develop exactly what they are envisioning.

Digital Painting

Powerhouse employs several experts in modern digital painting techniques. Digital painting is an emerging art form in which traditional painting techniques such as watercolor, oils, impasto, etc. are applied using digital tools by means of a modern computer applications. Digital painting can be used in concept design and in video game and animated content. A program like Adobe Photoshop offers a virtual canvas and painting box with a large amount of brushes, colors and other supplies.

Educational

Experienced in Education: Whether you are working on a phonics program for preschoolers or a tool to teach business executives at Fortune 500 companies, animation is the best way to help people enjoy and retain the materials you are trying to teach. Powerhouse’s first assignment in 2001 was to create animation for education. Not a year has passed without Powerhouse creating animation for an major education project. Click on some of our favorite examples below:

Flash Animation

Adobe Flash is a vector-based animation program. Though a lot more can be done with Flash than most people realize, it is often associated with limited animation. Limited animation uses multiple layers for a character body parts to create animation quickly and more efficiently. Today, this style is a popular way to utilize modern styles and design, as well keep a cost-efficient pipeline. Here at Powerhouse, we’re experts at limited animation. Powerhouse has been using Flash to create limited animation as well as traditional animation. We have worked with Adobe, as a testing group, to help push Flash beyond its capabilities.

After Effects

After Effects is an amazing program that can handle a wide variety of demands required by production. At the very basic level, it’s a compositing program that allows us to take all the elements of an animated project, stick them into the same scene, and make sure that they really shine before it gets sent off to an audience. At higher levels, it can tackle special effects (including live action), motion comics, motion graphics, and can even utilize a complex rigging system to create its own unique style of puppet animation. Every single project we do here at Powerhouse makes its way into After Effects at some point during production.

Graphic Design

Not only does Powerhouse create concept design and art for character based animated pieces, we also can put our artists to work on all of your print, infographic, logo, poster and other graphic design needs. Furthermore, our experience with working on major advertising campaigns allows us to make sure you get the most leverage out of the graphic design we create, so that you can use assets from our in multiple platforms.

Featured Work

We like to let our work speak for itself. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and since most of our animations move at 24 pictures/frames per second, that’s 1,440,000 words a minute. Additionally, Powerhouse Animation creates animation in a wide spectrum of styles.

Explore some of our favorite projects here, using the arrows below, to see the diversity of our work. Then, contact us to let us know how we can help on your next big project.

Powerhouse is doubly excited about this year’s Austin Film Festival next month! Two films we had the honor of being a part of, 21 Years: Richard...

About Us

Powerhouse Animation Studios, Inc.’s mission statement is simple:

To better humanity through the miracle of traditional animation and space-age multimedia technology; to promote truth, justice, and commerce through cartoons.

For a decade we have been doing just that. We have helped end communism by promoting trade through television commercials for brands like Oreo, Coca Cola, and Old Spice. We have assisted clean-cut, old-fashioned patriots like Adam Sandler and Kevin Smith spread joy and frivolity. We have helped corporate stewards of our society like Disney, Marvel, ESPN, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, and Sony spread their ideas across this great land of ours.

About Us

Powerhouse Animation Studios, Inc is a traditional animation studio based in Austin, TX. Since 2001, we have been bringing ideas to life. Powerhouse produces film, television, and game animation, including commercials, video game cinemas, character designs, storyboards, animatics, Flash games, Facebook games and more. Give us a call and let us walk you through costing and the production process, and tell us more about your idea.